Only foolish snobs don’t believe in William Shakespeare

A new film about the Bard merely fuels the absurd conspiracy theories that
surround our best loved plays.

What do Shakespeare, Keats and Dickens have in common, apart from being great writers, and masters of the English language? The answer is pretty obvious. None of them went to university: to some extent, all three were self-educated. Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek”, and likewise I don’t think Dickens and Keats, despite the latter’s Ode to a Grecian Urn, had much of either.

Who is the odd one out, then? Just as easy? Nobody, I think, has ever suggested Keats didn’t write that ode and others, or that Dickens wasn’t the author of Bleak House and Great Expectations. But Shakespeare – ah, Shakespeare – there’s a whole industry devoted to trying to prove that somebody else wrote his plays. So here we go again, with a movie from Roland Emmerich, director of Godzilla, called Anonymous, opening on Friday. The “Shakespearean thriller” hands the authorship to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, whom the movie, incredibly, has as the love-child and incestuous lover of Queen Elizabeth.

Never mind that Oxford died in 1604, some years before Shakespeare’s last plays were written and produced. Such considerations are a mere bagatelle when conspiracies are being revealed. Never mind that nobody at the time attributed the authorship to anyone but the man from Stratford. Evidently, they were all fooled, even Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright who knew William Shakespeare and was not devoid of jealousy.

It is not hard to guess at the director’s interest in the authorial conspiracy. But what of those not thinking of box office returns? Snobbery is the reason for their nonsense. The “uneducated” Shakespeare, an actor and theatre manager, who attended neither Oxford nor Cambridge, could not – could he? – have had all the knowledge of Greece and Rome and Italy etc displayed in the plays.

This argument falls flat for three reasons. First, the knowledge isn’t that great. Almost all the stuff in the Roman plays is taken – cribbed, if you like – from North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Indeed, some of the great speeches in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are no more than versifications of North’s prose. There are many lines in the plays which suggest that the author had read Ovid’s works, but this required no knowledge of Latin. Arthur Golding’s marvellous translation of the Metamorphoses was available to him. However, Shakespeare did make mistakes which a better-educated and well-travelled man such as Oxford might not have made. His knowledge of Italian geography is patchy, and he thought Bohemia had a sea-coast.

Second, and more to the point, is the evidence that the plays were written by a working man of the theatre. Sources in the shape of old plays, novels, stories, histories and chronicles have been found for all of them. T S Eliot argued that the problem with Hamlet was that Shakespeare found difficulty in reconciling the original revenge play, which he was refashioning, with the other themes he wanted to explore. So the result, in Eliot’s opinion, was a mess, a glorious mess, but still a mess.

Shakespeare, like a Hollywood hack, is often reworking others’ material, improving on it, certainly, but still reworking. One should think of him being required by his partners in the theatre to make them a new play, often by acting as what we would today call a script-doctor, adapting an already existing but inadequate text. All the evidence suggests that he worked very closely with his colleagues, some of whom, especially the clowns, may have contributed lines to the text that was performed.

In short, Shakespeare was working in a way familiar to many writers today who may be commissioned to turn a novel into a film, or to write a drama-documentary, using material in the public domain, on, say, the Falklands or the Iraq war. Far from being a dilettante aristocrat, the author of the plays is better thought of as being a hack of genius working in collaboration with the other members of his company.

Third, and perhaps more important, playwrights – and novelists – are magpies; that’s to say, thieves. They pick up bits and pieces of information and put them to use, often letting a single line or observation suggest a depth of knowledge they don’t actually possess. Shakespeare had no need to have travelled or to have studied law, or been active in politics, to write the plays. Works of literature are made from memory, experience (which includes what you have read), observation and imagination, especially the kind of imagination we call “sympathetic” ; and if you have the last of these, a little of the others can be made to go a very long way.

The trouble with the Shakespeare authorship fantasists is not that they usually know very little about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, though this is the case, it’s that they know even less about how poems and plays (or indeed novels) get written. And the trouble with Hollywood directors is, they don’t really care.